Select an Entire Table in MS Word

Finding out you need to select the entire table to oh, let’s say, change the font or format the borders or whatever? The list could go on and on.

What do you do?

Do you select the first cell, hold the mouse button down and drag, hoping not to miss anything by releasing the mouse button too early or accidentally highlighting the lines below the table?

Or, maybe you like the Shift key technique. You know, where you select the first cell, hold down the Shift key and then select the last cell. That’s not a bad plan, unless the last cell is pages and pages away and you’ve got to scroll to get there.

Looking for a better selection process?

Well, here are a couple of quick and easy selection processes for MS Word tables.

To select the entire table, you could:

Click on the move handle of the table (found in the upper left corner).

Click on the resize handle of the table (found in the bottom right corner).

And… in older versions of Word I found that I could use Alt key + double-click on the table. (Using Word 2007? Sorry but all I seemed able to accomplish was to open the Research task pane and have the cursor jump between left & center justified.)

Any way you choose, it beats the old drag and scroll methods!

~April

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on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 10:05 AM and is filed under MS Word.
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On the quick access bar at top of window. Click on the hand with finger pointing up (Touch/Mouse Mode (its drop down box)
And choose Mouse: standard ribbon & commands. Optimized for use with mouse.
That will show the table handle
Now you can Click on the move handle of the table (found in the upper left corner of table).
or click on the resize handle of the table (found in the bottom right corner).
To not view move handle or resize handle just select the “Touch” of the touch/Mouse Mode finger icon.

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